Faculty Spotlight
December 1999 - January 2000
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From Baby Steps to Full StrideDr. Gretchen WhitneyCollege of Information Science |
Dr. Gretchen Whitney, College of Information Science, is a walking, talking history of educational computing! She began using technology in 1978-79 while working for OCLC. The group was looking into partnering up with a service called "The Source" out of Virginia. The interface was similar to a text-based online service like American Online or CompuServe, that offered chat rooms, horoscopes, and news and information services. Gretchen volunteered to investigate its potential. Gretchen's reaction: " I could see that electronic communities were going to work. Even from that primitive stage, I could see what was coming. It was great, great fun."
Gretchen then embarked on her doctoral program at Michigan. It was here that she began using electronic communications as a student and as an instructor. Using broken computer terminals and whatever technology could be begged, borrowed, or appropriated, she and her professor built six operational BeeHive* terminals.
The Eighties
"This was the early 80s. And I got to take one home. And so all of a sudden, here I am at home, and I realize that my students can send me email whenever they want to. And I can manage my email, and send them a message back. And this just opened up, just a whole new world of interacting with the students. It took them a while to, sort of get used to this, but it wasn’t until the, I would guess the late, the early 90s that students were very comfortable with this mode of interaction. Early 90s and mid 90s. Because there was a lot of resistance to it in the beginning. They wanted to come and sit in my office and talk to talk to me. Not that I didn't want them to, but I wanted them to be able to reach me when ever *they* needed to, not just when I was around.* A BeeHive terminal is about three feet by two feet by a foot-and-a-half deep, with a screen the size of a Mac SE.
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